Monday 4 September 2017

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978)

"The tomatoes are coming!"

Oh my. That's... quite a cultural experience. What have I just watched?

So very low budget; totally devoid of stars (the most "famous" person in the film seems to be Gregg Berger, who would provide the voice for Grimlock in the Transformers cartoon the following decade), and many of the big roles are played by people with no other screen credits. And yet... this is absolutely wonderful.

There isn't so much a plot here, or at least no more so than there is in the first two Monty Python films; instead we get a series of linked sketches, all showing us some very Pythonesqye humour; indeed, the whole thing reminds me of the tennis-playing blancmange sketch. The film is chick full of brilliant sketches, including an interesting precursor of the Two Ronnies' famous "crossed lines" sketch. And it's all so splendidly '70s, with a superb skewering of the advertising agency, although with a very jarring bit of anti-Japanese racism near the start. And the tomatoes themselves... words fail me.

The conclusion is, of course, both random and inspired, imparting the important moral message that chart pop is evil, and the final scene with the carrot promises, or threatens, a sequel. I'm, well, defeated by this film...


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